16 ms·

Yes, Amazon Echo Is an Ad Machine

206 points by ourmandave 9y ago

tyfon 9y ago
I'm surprised anyone wouldn't think so. TVs are the same. And phones. And most web sites. And buses, walls, taxies, public transportation stops, bridges over roads etc etc. One has to work hard to defend against the ad onslaught these days.
- YouAreGreat 9y ago
  This needs a collective defense, i.e. state action: An advertising tax to take the profit out of most of it.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    You're not wrong. The individual right to 'choose' is not strong enough to enact real change in this space. But a tax is a short sighted and there's no reason to believe that any state dislikes the current state of advertising enough to effectively ban it outright.
    - vincnetas 9y ago
      Google "city without ads sao paulo". IIRC there are no outdoor ads in the city.
      - virtualmic 9y ago
        Almost true for Chandigarh in India, as well.
      - tyfon 9y ago
        That is wonderful. I wish there was a ban on ads in public spaces here as well.
  - kk_cz 9y ago
    I agree in instances where ads pollute public spaces, but nobody is forcing you to use Echo or watch TV. If you don't like ads you have a personal choice to do something about it, no government involvment is necessary IMHO.
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      Yes but my personal choice is limited because the government refuses to step in. Right now I can choose between an Echo which tries to sell me and my kids Colgate toothpaste or not having an Echo at all. With government action I could choose between an Echo (without ads) or not having an Echo at all. In this way government has actually created better options for me to exercise my personal choice on.
      - kk_cz 9y ago
        > Yes but my personal choice is limited because the government refuses to step in. Wow. Do you really believe that it's government job to guarantee ad-free Echo?
        frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
        That's not exactly how I would phrase it but basically. I mean you would agree that a bunch of people could organize a boycott of Echo with ads and eventually Amazon would stop selling it and sell Echo without ads and that would be fine right? So why don't we just do that? It's because we lack a coordination mechanism, the incentive of individual boycotters is to cheat. Luckily humans have developed a great coordination mechanism called 'democracy' and we can use it when coordination in the market place has failed.
        dbmikus 9y ago
        Or someone can make another audio-controlled device that doesn't sell ads and that can be a separate company. I don't see why you would immediately go towards having the government step in and regulate whether Amazon can make the Echo prefer their own products quite yet. It's still a new device and there are some other competitors. I could agree that companies be required to have a disclaimer when they provide preference to a certain product set over another.
- Feniks 9y ago
  The whole POINT of Echo is to always listen and direct your consumer pattern to Amazon and other approved affiliates. To me it represents pure evil and I don't see how you could defend against it. Except for not buying into this stupid shit.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    The whole point of my Echo is to play music and set timers and pre-heat my car in the morning and such. There’s no avenue for any consumer anything unless you allow it by using the device to shop. I don’t entirely understand why people are surprised that using an Amazon device to shop on Amazon might result in biases toward what Amazon sees as beneficial. Buying stuff with a voice assistant is antithetical to the sort of comparison shopping you need to do to have a hope of retaining some agency in what you decide to buy.
    - pwinnski 9y ago
      That's not why Amazon sold you an echo, though. Cortana or Siri exist without obvious nefarious purpose. Alex and Google are clearly trying to push advertising. I know which I would prefer to set timers and play music for me.
      - addicted 9y ago
        It’s a massive failure of the tech industry that the vast majority of the world doesn’t even realize this, and therefore places very little, if any, price premium on the “does not snoop on you” feature.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        Does it matter why they sold it to me if I don't use it that way?
        walterbell 9y ago
        Yes, because it will likely evolve in ways not optimized for you, vs supporting a product that caters to your use case. Many products co-evolve with users, as the product modifies daily workflows. If you are not the target user, the product can evolve based on requirements that are adversarial to you.
- addicted 9y ago
  The passivity of most of those mediums make them different. TVs, Walls, taxis, etc. are not personally targeting you based on intimate private information about you. The internet and smartphones are, but even those are not snooping in on your conversations (or so we believe, hence the hue and cry about Facebook listening in). Alexa is different in that it’s listening to all your conversations, including presumably extremely private ones.
favicons 9y ago
A website that makes 100+ requests of which 30 get blocked warns me about ads. This is hilarious.
- jermaustin1 9y ago
  The difference is that Gizmodo is "upfront" about it. For amazon to say, "Use _____ to remove that stain," and allow my company to put in a $0.35 per request bid to fill it in with "Jeremy's Awesome Cleaning Sauce," seems inherently more wrong.
  - edraferi 9y ago
    I dunno, could be some value in the long tail there. Discoverability is the main problem with voice interfaces (aka the world's worst-documented CLI). Third-party skills are already the backbone of Alexa's value, but you have to discover and activate individual skills manually. Amazon needs to get better at general queries, which is hard. It could be useful to allow people bid on specific kinds of general queries. "You can use our cleaning product for that" is a better answer than "Sorry, I don't know." There's also some signalling here. It shows that someone is willing to bet money that they have what I want. This is similar to search engine ads. Like with search engine ads, transparency & privacy are really important. I want to know when I'm receiving sponsored content. I want to know what information was used to decide to show me that content. Duck Duck Go gets this right. Podcasts that play special background music during ad breaks get this right. Maybe Alexa needs a separate voice or tone for responses with sponsored content.
  - GunlogAlm 9y ago
    Is it? If it identifies itself as an advertisement, I see no distinction.
    - untog 9y ago
      But according to the article, it doesn't. In the example of buying toothpaste, Alexa just says "I can search for a brand, like Colgate". It doesn't indicate whether Colgate paid for that placement.
biocomputation 9y ago
I feel like it's a corporate surveillance device. Same goes for similar products by different manufacturers.
- taeric 9y ago
  Do you include your phone? I'm torn in the thought. At face value, I can't but agree. However, I also enable crash reporting in many applications. Have for years. Firefox gets usage stats. At some point, I have to wonder why I trust one group of people and not another. More, have the groups I trust changed out from under me?
  - epicide 9y ago
    I think this is why many companies are able to so easily intrude on privacy. Some people are already of the mindset "I have nothing to hide, so why bother?". Others see the value in privacy, try to lock things down, realize their trust model is shaky at best, and give up the whole thing. I think the thing to realize is that trust is inherently faulty. Trust requires some level of unproven belief. This is why it has to be earned and why it is so easily broken. I think the better way to put it is that you shouldn't really "trust" any company (or anybody that has motivation to exploit you) 100%. You can establish different qualifiers to trust, as well. For example, I (currently) trust using my Echo for small calculations and timers. If Amazon were to sell that data to 3rd parties, I would trade that bit of privacy (about my timer usage) for the convenience. The moment I see anything about Amazon doing an "always listening/recording even without the wake word", that thing is getting unplugged or thrown away. (if this is already a KNOWN thing, somebody please tell me) tl;dr trust isn't an all-or-nothing proposition.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      Agreed. I do the best I reasonably can, in regards to privacy and trust. When I identify an issue, such as a privacy hole I wasn't aware of, or a company that proves itself undeserving of trust, I update my approach. Maybe I'll have to migrate some services or buy a more privacy-focused alternative, maybe revise which information I provide in user profiles, but I think that's worth it. You gotta start somewhere.
Someone1234 9y ago
Amazon may want to tread carefully here. Previously their business model was simply to create a fast-lane into Amazon ordering (e.g. "Alexa order me some toilet paper"), but if what the article says is true they're going to ruin normal searching by only giving you product results (Q: "alexa how do I remove a wine stain?" A: "buy Dr. Bubbles Super cleaner"). If Echo is going to give me bad results for questions I'd just stop using it for that. I'll use whatever personal assistant gives me the highest quality results. If your business model inherently degrades the quality, then your business model is self-destructive.
- Spivak 9y ago
  > I'll use whatever personal assistant gives me the highest quality results. Ultimately this is the problem. They don't have to be good, they just have to be less shitty than their competition and the major players are making their money on ads.
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    To put it another way, their goal is to be the scum floating on the puddle of diarrhea.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      That's the goal of most companies in competitive markets, yes.
- have_faith 9y ago
  I don't think their strategy of sell em cheap and get a echo into every home will actually save them here as the barrier to switching to a competitor is very low. Coupled with the fact that I get the impression that no one uses their echo for anything other than asking about the weather.
  - jermaustin1 9y ago
    That and you can have multiple timers running. When cooking I use that. When leaving the house, I ask the weather for the day. When planning a weekend trip, I get the weather a for the weekend at where ever.
Edmond 9y ago
Amazon got me on their Kindle, which is also an Ad device...I posted a rant about my experience years ago: http://colabopad.blogspot.com/2013/12/do-not-buy-amazon-kindle-fire.html http://colabopad.blogspot.com/2013/12/do-not-buy-amazon-kind...
- Splines 9y ago
  Their e-readers are great. I have a Paperwhite and leave it in airplane mode and the ads stopped. I push content to it through Calibre.
jasonmaydie 9y ago
Back in the day when google was growing, there were similar alarms about tracking and personalized ads. People didn't care, I doubt they would care with devices like echo too.
- nickjj 9y ago
  I think the difference here is you can 100% ignore ads on Google. At this point my brain doesn't even see sponsored ads as I immediately look at the first organic result. If you consume your content through audio then you're forced into listening to the ad / sponsored answer.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    > At this point my brain doesn't even see sponsored ads "I'm not affected by ads" is just a lie we tell ourselves. Why aren't you just blocking them? Around these parts it's basically digital hygiene.
    - nickjj 9y ago
      I do block them with ublock origin and have been for years. For some unknown reason I thought adwords ads came through and I just happened to subconsciously ignore them, but having just Googled for something now, I see they are not even there. Funny how the brain works.
bibinou 9y ago
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/02/amazon-alexa-is-opening-up-to-more-sponsored-product-ads.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/02/amazon-alexa-is-opening-up-t...
hallman76 9y ago
With a 120 million Alexa devices in market of course big brands are trying to figure out how to reach those audiences. If you're P&G and you're selling products through Amazon of course you'd ask how your brand can better leverage the Alexa platform. That doesn't mean Amazon is going to do anything about it. IMO Amazon can't afford to squander their voice lead by tarnishing the Alexa brand with poorly implemented ads.
hawski 9y ago
Mozilla recently released open source speech recognition model [1]. What minimal and reasonably cheap device could be used to run it? There could be or already is an open source project that could replace devices like Echo. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/29/announcing-the-initial-release-of-mozillas-open-source-speech-recognition-model-and-voice-dataset/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/29/announcing-the-init...
- jabujabu 9y ago
  I imagine something similar to an Echo could be thrown together on a raspberry pi or something similar.
  - deeth_starr_v 9y ago
    Kinda. The issue is the microphone. It's a specialized piece of hardware that uses a microphone array and also has wake word logic built in. There are only a couple companies that sell this and they don't sell one offs. But maybe in the future.
    - Vendan 9y ago
      Wake word logic is not the hard part, you can do it in software relatively cheaply (cmusphinx/pocketsphinx handles wake word type logic in realtime with relatively low cpu requirements) Microphone quality is an issue, but there's stuff out there, it's just a matter of finding a good one. One popular one is the playstation eye camera, as it's really freaking cheap and is designed for speech input at medium distances, but it's not omnidirectional like the echo/google home mini kind of thing is.
  - Vendan 9y ago
    You'd imagine, but as someone that's tried, voice recognition is just one part of it, and is a rather hard problem in terms of computing power required. Note that the linked DeepSpeech stuff is a tensorflow based solution, and only hits a xRT of 0.44 on a GTX 1070. While that is slightly better then twice realtime, I really doubt anything less powerful then a handful of years old GPU is going to pull it off in realtime, and def. not a rPI or similar. edit: follow up clarification, the echo is NOT doing voice processing on the device itself, it ships it up to the cloud to do so. You could of course set up something similar to that using a raspberry pi and shipping audio to your desktop to be processed.
freeflight 9y ago
There's a certain irony to Gizmodo now going "Don't buy this!" after having it hyped as the "most innovative thing from Amazon" when it got released.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Well, the article probably isn't meant to convey opinion or information; it's goal is to drive ad views. Any opinions you read in it are incidental, and selected for maximum clicks.
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
Only relevant sentence in article "Proctor & Gamble as well as Clorox are reportedly in talks for major advertising deals that would allow Alexa to suggest products for you to buy."
toyg 9y ago
When rich people had manservants, it wouldn't be uncommon for them to discreetly get a cut from vendors for recommending their services. Corporate-provided electronic manservants will be no different: they will serve themselves before they serve you. Obviously the simplest solution is credible open-source alternatives; or there is always that pesky thing, the legislative process.
morgante 9y ago
This seems vastly overstated. I've never even bought something with my Alexa, let alone heard an ad from it.
bradleyjg 9y ago
I bought one of these because it was on sale and seemed like it might be fun, but since setting it up I’ve hardly ever used it. It’s voice recognition is pretty amazing but I’m just much more likely to google on my phone or desktop if I want to know something.
- mustacheemperor 9y ago
  I've found the search on the Echo is so bad it's almost invariably a waste of time since I end up taking my phone out and doing the search there anyway. But as the world's most expensive and convenient egg timer and lightswitch, it's a very helpful device. I can just tell alexa to set timers when I'm cooking, holler at it to turn the lights off when I leave, etc.
- wvenable 9y ago
  Search is pointless on the Echo but I get a huge amount of use out of it by putting it the kitchen. It's great for creating a shopping list, music playing, timers, reminders, math, etc.
jdietrich 9y ago
If you're concerned about the future of voice assistant technology, I'd encourage you to contribute to Free voice assistant projects like Jasper or Mycroft. With enough support, locally-hosted Free voice assistants could be a credible alternative to cloud-based proprietary products. https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://github.com/MycroftAI/ https://github.com/MycroftAI/ Lots of related projects could also use your help. You don't need to be an AI genius - every FOSS project can benefit from help with debugging, cleaning up code and writing documentation. Mozilla Open Voice just want you to read a few sentences to help build their training corpus. https://voice.mozilla.org/ https://voice.mozilla.org/ https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech https://opennlp.apache.org/ https://opennlp.apache.org/ http://www.nltk.org/ http://www.nltk.org/
- albertzeyer 9y ago
  Also: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant https://home-assistant.io/ https://home-assistant.io/
- ConfucianNardin 9y ago
  It's unfortunate that there aren't any high quality projects for the other way around - text to speech. By high quality I mean something as good as Tacotron 2 [1]. However, I have no illusions of Google ever releasing code or trained models. Someone will likely re-implement it from the paper, but it's unlikely to be anywhere near as good as those samples, due to worse tuning and lack of a good training set[2]. This effect can be seen if you compare Baidu's samples [3] for Deep Voice 3 with those from an implementation by a third party [4]. [1]: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/index.html https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/ind... [2]: Common voice, for example, will not work well, since you want lots of data from a single speaker for good results. See for example, how samples get progressively worse when increasing the number of speakers in training data[3]. [3]: http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-3-2000-speaker-neural-text-speech/ http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-3-2000-speaker-neural-t... [4]: https://r9y9.github.io/deepvoice3_pytorch/ https://r9y9.github.io/deepvoice3_pytorch/
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Starting with my pet peeves with home automation software... I started writing my own. Then it became the start of an assistant. Now I also run it in my car (I'm implementing navigation, and reading about CAN interfaces). The one thing, hilariously, not implemented yet, is voice recognition, but the whole system's designed to account for it. I'm hoping some of the open source projects for voice like Mozilla's will lead to something I feel comfortable implementing here. I personally strongly recommend people look to put the "personal" back in personal assistant. Build something that does what you need it to, you'd be surprised how easy it can be, and how educational doing it is. I've learned a ton of stuff I didn't know just implementing basic features.
- noxecanexx 9y ago
  Any idea where to start
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I started with a code sample of ten or so lines of Visual Basic .NET code that could allegedly turn on my Insteon light switch. Then I made it control my other Insteon devices. Then I started adding email notifications. Then I figured out a command line interface made it easy for me to add new commands/features quickly and that I could also then pipe things like input from an app or voice to that interface. It kind of grew organically. I don't think when I started if I planned to build what I've put together so far, I would have ever started, because it sounds daunting, especially given my level of experience when I started. Do one thing. Then do something else. :) As a sidebar, if you want the general knowledge type queries, Wolfram Alpha's API is incredible for this. They have a "spoken" API which presents the result of your query as a single text-string, ready to be output to a text-to-speech client. I think adding the ability to use Wolfram Alpha was all of a couple lines of code tops to my existing project. And of course, it's free for way more queries a month than you'd ever run on a personal use project.
    - noxecanexx 9y ago
      Thanks. I might start with simplifying my dev workflow, the perhaps some appliances
BrandiATMuhkuh 9y ago
During my PhD I ran simulations and experiments with robots + humans to explore the effect and possibility of it. The scariest part is, a small amount of companies might now be able to effect with just one update how a huge amount of people think/behave. The reason why Alexa is more powerful than normal advertisement is, people create a social connection to Alexa. Which is needed for "trusted" influence like recommendations from a friend. My thesis in case someone is interested: https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/13598 https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/13598
- whateveruser 9y ago
  If we've learned anything about advertisers in the past, is they WILL get greedy, and start exploiting human brain in more and more ways. Eventually it reaches uncanny valley, and more and more people start noticing how messed up and over the top advertising has gotten and find ways around them or to avoid them, or in the end, neglect them. Of course, this assumes people still 'own' their devices, at that..
  - BrandiATMuhkuh 9y ago
    Yes they will exploit it. But I think the real problem is, when you don't know if what you see/hear is advertisement. Like seeing a news paper article which is actually advertisement. Or a blogger who says a phone/shoes/etc. is the best she/he every tried. While it's actually bought advertisement.
partycoder 9y ago
If my Echo ever replies with an ad, it goes directly into the trash.
Digital-Citizen 9y ago
Amazon Echo might be "an ad machine" but that article is a good example of business-minded misdirection: using a relatively minor problem -- persistent advertising -- to deflect attention away from a much greater problem -- persistent spying -- where businesses are the main beneficiaries of the misdirection. The real problem with Echo is that it's an always-on microphone connected to a networked computer that runs proprietary software (see https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ for how proprietary software is often malware). Users have no software freedom to inspect what the software on the Echo does, change the Echo's software to make the Echo do something different, or share the Echo software (whether modified or not) to help their community. Even if Echo's software comes with some form of user controls, those controls are implemented with proprietary software, software users cannot trust. No matter how technical and willing a user is to improve their Echo device to meet their needs, the permission to do so is purposefully missing. Amazon does not respect a user's software freedom. Therefore there's no good reason to trust the Echo. For all we know Echo is now or at some later time will relay whatever is within mic range to someplace else, thus presenting a constant threat to one's privacy. Nobody needs Echo; it does nothing users weren't perfectly fine to do another way by visiting a website to place orders. But one should reconsider doing business with Amazon at all (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html https://stallman.org/amazon.html for details).
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I think there's a huge benefit to talking about the ad problem here. One of the reasons it is hard for linking/quoting Stallman to actually get you anywhere in discussion is that the Stallman view is one of absolute philosophy. "This is philosophically wrong" is not something the average consumer cares about, just like privacy invasion is a ghost nobody cares about until they see its effects. Things like convenience and things being free are very visible, noticeable traits, and the counter to those arguments need to also be visible. Advertising is a very visible effect of both privacy-invasive systems and proprietary software. People care about how ads affect them because they can see it.
  - Digital-Citizen 9y ago
alyxhorace 9y ago
Preface: I work for Mycroft, mentioned earlier in the thread. We're the open source alternative to the Amazon Alexa and Google home. This makes us customizable, privacy-minded, and neutral. The thing with the current voice assistants is that they store every. single. piece. of voice snippets they hear. Those recordings sit on their servers. At the end of the day, these corporations have a purpose other than creating a voice technology--they have very specific ways to pay the bills. Amazon is an e-commerce platform. Google lives off AdWords. To think they won't utilize the data they're collecting.. doesn't sound like a strategic decision they'd make. For those looking for a voice assistant that represents them--and not the corporation behind it, is Mycroft. A way to democratize voice and AI. Nonetheless, we're in the process of making our second device and if you're interested, you can get updates on it in the link below! We'd love for you to join our community and help us create an open voice assistant. Head to https://mycroft.ai https://mycroft.ai :) https://mycroft.ai/kickstarter-mark-2/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Something+Big+is+Coming&utm_campaign=Teaser+Email+%231+%7C+Something+Big+is+Coming https://mycroft.ai/kickstarter-mark-2/?utm_source=ActiveCamp...

206 points by ourmandave 9y ago

I'm surprised anyone wouldn't think so. TVs are the same. And phones. And most web sites. And buses, walls, taxies, public transportation stops, bridges over roads etc etc. One has to work hard to defend against the ad onslaught these days.

YouAreGreat 9y ago
This needs a collective defense, i.e. state action: An advertising tax to take the profit out of most of it.
- Spivak 9y ago
  You're not wrong. The individual right to 'choose' is not strong enough to enact real change in this space. But a tax is a short sighted and there's no reason to believe that any state dislikes the current state of advertising enough to effectively ban it outright.
  - vincnetas 9y ago
    Google "city without ads sao paulo". IIRC there are no outdoor ads in the city.
    - virtualmic 9y ago
      Almost true for Chandigarh in India, as well.
    - tyfon 9y ago
      That is wonderful. I wish there was a ban on ads in public spaces here as well.
- kk_cz 9y ago
  I agree in instances where ads pollute public spaces, but nobody is forcing you to use Echo or watch TV. If you don't like ads you have a personal choice to do something about it, no government involvment is necessary IMHO.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    Yes but my personal choice is limited because the government refuses to step in. Right now I can choose between an Echo which tries to sell me and my kids Colgate toothpaste or not having an Echo at all. With government action I could choose between an Echo (without ads) or not having an Echo at all. In this way government has actually created better options for me to exercise my personal choice on.
    - kk_cz 9y ago
      > Yes but my personal choice is limited because the government refuses to step in. Wow. Do you really believe that it's government job to guarantee ad-free Echo?
      - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
        That's not exactly how I would phrase it but basically. I mean you would agree that a bunch of people could organize a boycott of Echo with ads and eventually Amazon would stop selling it and sell Echo without ads and that would be fine right? So why don't we just do that? It's because we lack a coordination mechanism, the incentive of individual boycotters is to cheat. Luckily humans have developed a great coordination mechanism called 'democracy' and we can use it when coordination in the market place has failed.
        dbmikus 9y ago
        Or someone can make another audio-controlled device that doesn't sell ads and that can be a separate company. I don't see why you would immediately go towards having the government step in and regulate whether Amazon can make the Echo prefer their own products quite yet. It's still a new device and there are some other competitors. I could agree that companies be required to have a disclaimer when they provide preference to a certain product set over another.
Feniks 9y ago
The whole POINT of Echo is to always listen and direct your consumer pattern to Amazon and other approved affiliates. To me it represents pure evil and I don't see how you could defend against it. Except for not buying into this stupid shit.
- mikeash 9y ago
  The whole point of my Echo is to play music and set timers and pre-heat my car in the morning and such. There’s no avenue for any consumer anything unless you allow it by using the device to shop. I don’t entirely understand why people are surprised that using an Amazon device to shop on Amazon might result in biases toward what Amazon sees as beneficial. Buying stuff with a voice assistant is antithetical to the sort of comparison shopping you need to do to have a hope of retaining some agency in what you decide to buy.
  - pwinnski 9y ago
    That's not why Amazon sold you an echo, though. Cortana or Siri exist without obvious nefarious purpose. Alex and Google are clearly trying to push advertising. I know which I would prefer to set timers and play music for me.
    - addicted 9y ago
      It’s a massive failure of the tech industry that the vast majority of the world doesn’t even realize this, and therefore places very little, if any, price premium on the “does not snoop on you” feature.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Does it matter why they sold it to me if I don't use it that way?
      - walterbell 9y ago
        Yes, because it will likely evolve in ways not optimized for you, vs supporting a product that caters to your use case. Many products co-evolve with users, as the product modifies daily workflows. If you are not the target user, the product can evolve based on requirements that are adversarial to you.
addicted 9y ago
The passivity of most of those mediums make them different. TVs, Walls, taxis, etc. are not personally targeting you based on intimate private information about you. The internet and smartphones are, but even those are not snooping in on your conversations (or so we believe, hence the hue and cry about Facebook listening in). Alexa is different in that it’s listening to all your conversations, including presumably extremely private ones.

favicons 9y ago

A website that makes 100+ requests of which 30 get blocked warns me about ads. This is hilarious.

jermaustin1 9y ago
The difference is that Gizmodo is "upfront" about it. For amazon to say, "Use _____ to remove that stain," and allow my company to put in a $0.35 per request bid to fill it in with "Jeremy's Awesome Cleaning Sauce," seems inherently more wrong.
- edraferi 9y ago
  I dunno, could be some value in the long tail there. Discoverability is the main problem with voice interfaces (aka the world's worst-documented CLI). Third-party skills are already the backbone of Alexa's value, but you have to discover and activate individual skills manually. Amazon needs to get better at general queries, which is hard. It could be useful to allow people bid on specific kinds of general queries. "You can use our cleaning product for that" is a better answer than "Sorry, I don't know." There's also some signalling here. It shows that someone is willing to bet money that they have what I want. This is similar to search engine ads. Like with search engine ads, transparency & privacy are really important. I want to know when I'm receiving sponsored content. I want to know what information was used to decide to show me that content. Duck Duck Go gets this right. Podcasts that play special background music during ad breaks get this right. Maybe Alexa needs a separate voice or tone for responses with sponsored content.
- GunlogAlm 9y ago
  Is it? If it identifies itself as an advertisement, I see no distinction.
  - untog 9y ago
    But according to the article, it doesn't. In the example of buying toothpaste, Alexa just says "I can search for a brand, like Colgate". It doesn't indicate whether Colgate paid for that placement.

biocomputation 9y ago

I feel like it's a corporate surveillance device. Same goes for similar products by different manufacturers.

taeric 9y ago
Do you include your phone? I'm torn in the thought. At face value, I can't but agree. However, I also enable crash reporting in many applications. Have for years. Firefox gets usage stats. At some point, I have to wonder why I trust one group of people and not another. More, have the groups I trust changed out from under me?
- epicide 9y ago
  I think this is why many companies are able to so easily intrude on privacy. Some people are already of the mindset "I have nothing to hide, so why bother?". Others see the value in privacy, try to lock things down, realize their trust model is shaky at best, and give up the whole thing. I think the thing to realize is that trust is inherently faulty. Trust requires some level of unproven belief. This is why it has to be earned and why it is so easily broken. I think the better way to put it is that you shouldn't really "trust" any company (or anybody that has motivation to exploit you) 100%. You can establish different qualifiers to trust, as well. For example, I (currently) trust using my Echo for small calculations and timers. If Amazon were to sell that data to 3rd parties, I would trade that bit of privacy (about my timer usage) for the convenience. The moment I see anything about Amazon doing an "always listening/recording even without the wake word", that thing is getting unplugged or thrown away. (if this is already a KNOWN thing, somebody please tell me) tl;dr trust isn't an all-or-nothing proposition.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Agreed. I do the best I reasonably can, in regards to privacy and trust. When I identify an issue, such as a privacy hole I wasn't aware of, or a company that proves itself undeserving of trust, I update my approach. Maybe I'll have to migrate some services or buy a more privacy-focused alternative, maybe revise which information I provide in user profiles, but I think that's worth it. You gotta start somewhere.

Someone1234 9y ago

Amazon may want to tread carefully here. Previously their business model was simply to create a fast-lane into Amazon ordering (e.g. "Alexa order me some toilet paper"), but if what the article says is true they're going to ruin normal searching by only giving you product results (Q: "alexa how do I remove a wine stain?" A: "buy Dr. Bubbles Super cleaner"). If Echo is going to give me bad results for questions I'd just stop using it for that. I'll use whatever personal assistant gives me the highest quality results. If your business model inherently degrades the quality, then your business model is self-destructive.

Spivak 9y ago
> I'll use whatever personal assistant gives me the highest quality results. Ultimately this is the problem. They don't have to be good, they just have to be less shitty than their competition and the major players are making their money on ads.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  To put it another way, their goal is to be the scum floating on the puddle of diarrhea.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    That's the goal of most companies in competitive markets, yes.
have_faith 9y ago
I don't think their strategy of sell em cheap and get a echo into every home will actually save them here as the barrier to switching to a competitor is very low. Coupled with the fact that I get the impression that no one uses their echo for anything other than asking about the weather.
- jermaustin1 9y ago
  That and you can have multiple timers running. When cooking I use that. When leaving the house, I ask the weather for the day. When planning a weekend trip, I get the weather a for the weekend at where ever.

Edmond 9y ago

Amazon got me on their Kindle, which is also an Ad device...I posted a rant about my experience years ago: http://colabopad.blogspot.com/2013/12/do-not-buy-amazon-kindle-fire.html http://colabopad.blogspot.com/2013/12/do-not-buy-amazon-kind...

Splines 9y ago
Their e-readers are great. I have a Paperwhite and leave it in airplane mode and the ads stopped. I push content to it through Calibre.

jasonmaydie 9y ago

Back in the day when google was growing, there were similar alarms about tracking and personalized ads. People didn't care, I doubt they would care with devices like echo too.

nickjj 9y ago
I think the difference here is you can 100% ignore ads on Google. At this point my brain doesn't even see sponsored ads as I immediately look at the first organic result. If you consume your content through audio then you're forced into listening to the ad / sponsored answer.
- Spivak 9y ago
  > At this point my brain doesn't even see sponsored ads "I'm not affected by ads" is just a lie we tell ourselves. Why aren't you just blocking them? Around these parts it's basically digital hygiene.
  - nickjj 9y ago
    I do block them with ublock origin and have been for years. For some unknown reason I thought adwords ads came through and I just happened to subconsciously ignore them, but having just Googled for something now, I see they are not even there. Funny how the brain works.

bibinou 9y ago

source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/02/amazon-alexa-is-opening-up-to-more-sponsored-product-ads.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/02/amazon-alexa-is-opening-up-t...

hallman76 9y ago

With a 120 million Alexa devices in market of course big brands are trying to figure out how to reach those audiences. If you're P&G and you're selling products through Amazon of course you'd ask how your brand can better leverage the Alexa platform. That doesn't mean Amazon is going to do anything about it. IMO Amazon can't afford to squander their voice lead by tarnishing the Alexa brand with poorly implemented ads.

hawski 9y ago

Mozilla recently released open source speech recognition model [1]. What minimal and reasonably cheap device could be used to run it? There could be or already is an open source project that could replace devices like Echo. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/29/announcing-the-initial-release-of-mozillas-open-source-speech-recognition-model-and-voice-dataset/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/29/announcing-the-init...

jabujabu 9y ago
I imagine something similar to an Echo could be thrown together on a raspberry pi or something similar.
- deeth_starr_v 9y ago
  Kinda. The issue is the microphone. It's a specialized piece of hardware that uses a microphone array and also has wake word logic built in. There are only a couple companies that sell this and they don't sell one offs. But maybe in the future.
  - Vendan 9y ago
    Wake word logic is not the hard part, you can do it in software relatively cheaply (cmusphinx/pocketsphinx handles wake word type logic in realtime with relatively low cpu requirements) Microphone quality is an issue, but there's stuff out there, it's just a matter of finding a good one. One popular one is the playstation eye camera, as it's really freaking cheap and is designed for speech input at medium distances, but it's not omnidirectional like the echo/google home mini kind of thing is.
- Vendan 9y ago
  You'd imagine, but as someone that's tried, voice recognition is just one part of it, and is a rather hard problem in terms of computing power required. Note that the linked DeepSpeech stuff is a tensorflow based solution, and only hits a xRT of 0.44 on a GTX 1070. While that is slightly better then twice realtime, I really doubt anything less powerful then a handful of years old GPU is going to pull it off in realtime, and def. not a rPI or similar. edit: follow up clarification, the echo is NOT doing voice processing on the device itself, it ships it up to the cloud to do so. You could of course set up something similar to that using a raspberry pi and shipping audio to your desktop to be processed.

freeflight 9y ago

There's a certain irony to Gizmodo now going "Don't buy this!" after having it hyped as the "most innovative thing from Amazon" when it got released.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Well, the article probably isn't meant to convey opinion or information; it's goal is to drive ad views. Any opinions you read in it are incidental, and selected for maximum clicks.

_Codemonkeyism 9y ago

Only relevant sentence in article "Proctor & Gamble as well as Clorox are reportedly in talks for major advertising deals that would allow Alexa to suggest products for you to buy."

toyg 9y ago

When rich people had manservants, it wouldn't be uncommon for them to discreetly get a cut from vendors for recommending their services. Corporate-provided electronic manservants will be no different: they will serve themselves before they serve you. Obviously the simplest solution is credible open-source alternatives; or there is always that pesky thing, the legislative process.

morgante 9y ago

This seems vastly overstated. I've never even bought something with my Alexa, let alone heard an ad from it.

bradleyjg 9y ago

I bought one of these because it was on sale and seemed like it might be fun, but since setting it up I’ve hardly ever used it. It’s voice recognition is pretty amazing but I’m just much more likely to google on my phone or desktop if I want to know something.

mustacheemperor 9y ago
I've found the search on the Echo is so bad it's almost invariably a waste of time since I end up taking my phone out and doing the search there anyway. But as the world's most expensive and convenient egg timer and lightswitch, it's a very helpful device. I can just tell alexa to set timers when I'm cooking, holler at it to turn the lights off when I leave, etc.
wvenable 9y ago
Search is pointless on the Echo but I get a huge amount of use out of it by putting it the kitchen. It's great for creating a shopping list, music playing, timers, reminders, math, etc.

jdietrich 9y ago

If you're concerned about the future of voice assistant technology, I'd encourage you to contribute to Free voice assistant projects like Jasper or Mycroft. With enough support, locally-hosted Free voice assistants could be a credible alternative to cloud-based proprietary products. https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://github.com/MycroftAI/ https://github.com/MycroftAI/ Lots of related projects could also use your help. You don't need to be an AI genius - every FOSS project can benefit from help with debugging, cleaning up code and writing documentation. Mozilla Open Voice just want you to read a few sentences to help build their training corpus. https://voice.mozilla.org/ https://voice.mozilla.org/ https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech https://opennlp.apache.org/ https://opennlp.apache.org/ http://www.nltk.org/ http://www.nltk.org/

albertzeyer 9y ago
Also: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant https://home-assistant.io/ https://home-assistant.io/
ConfucianNardin 9y ago
It's unfortunate that there aren't any high quality projects for the other way around - text to speech. By high quality I mean something as good as Tacotron 2 [1]. However, I have no illusions of Google ever releasing code or trained models. Someone will likely re-implement it from the paper, but it's unlikely to be anywhere near as good as those samples, due to worse tuning and lack of a good training set[2]. This effect can be seen if you compare Baidu's samples [3] for Deep Voice 3 with those from an implementation by a third party [4]. [1]: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/index.html https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/ind... [2]: Common voice, for example, will not work well, since you want lots of data from a single speaker for good results. See for example, how samples get progressively worse when increasing the number of speakers in training data[3]. [3]: http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-3-2000-speaker-neural-text-speech/ http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-3-2000-speaker-neural-t... [4]: https://r9y9.github.io/deepvoice3_pytorch/ https://r9y9.github.io/deepvoice3_pytorch/

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

Starting with my pet peeves with home automation software... I started writing my own. Then it became the start of an assistant. Now I also run it in my car (I'm implementing navigation, and reading about CAN interfaces). The one thing, hilariously, not implemented yet, is voice recognition, but the whole system's designed to account for it. I'm hoping some of the open source projects for voice like Mozilla's will lead to something I feel comfortable implementing here. I personally strongly recommend people look to put the "personal" back in personal assistant. Build something that does what you need it to, you'd be surprised how easy it can be, and how educational doing it is. I've learned a ton of stuff I didn't know just implementing basic features.

noxecanexx 9y ago
Any idea where to start
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I started with a code sample of ten or so lines of Visual Basic .NET code that could allegedly turn on my Insteon light switch. Then I made it control my other Insteon devices. Then I started adding email notifications. Then I figured out a command line interface made it easy for me to add new commands/features quickly and that I could also then pipe things like input from an app or voice to that interface. It kind of grew organically. I don't think when I started if I planned to build what I've put together so far, I would have ever started, because it sounds daunting, especially given my level of experience when I started. Do one thing. Then do something else. :) As a sidebar, if you want the general knowledge type queries, Wolfram Alpha's API is incredible for this. They have a "spoken" API which presents the result of your query as a single text-string, ready to be output to a text-to-speech client. I think adding the ability to use Wolfram Alpha was all of a couple lines of code tops to my existing project. And of course, it's free for way more queries a month than you'd ever run on a personal use project.
  - noxecanexx 9y ago
    Thanks. I might start with simplifying my dev workflow, the perhaps some appliances

BrandiATMuhkuh 9y ago

During my PhD I ran simulations and experiments with robots + humans to explore the effect and possibility of it. The scariest part is, a small amount of companies might now be able to effect with just one update how a huge amount of people think/behave. The reason why Alexa is more powerful than normal advertisement is, people create a social connection to Alexa. Which is needed for "trusted" influence like recommendations from a friend. My thesis in case someone is interested: https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/13598 https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/13598

whateveruser 9y ago
If we've learned anything about advertisers in the past, is they WILL get greedy, and start exploiting human brain in more and more ways. Eventually it reaches uncanny valley, and more and more people start noticing how messed up and over the top advertising has gotten and find ways around them or to avoid them, or in the end, neglect them. Of course, this assumes people still 'own' their devices, at that..
- BrandiATMuhkuh 9y ago
  Yes they will exploit it. But I think the real problem is, when you don't know if what you see/hear is advertisement. Like seeing a news paper article which is actually advertisement. Or a blogger who says a phone/shoes/etc. is the best she/he every tried. While it's actually bought advertisement.

partycoder 9y ago

If my Echo ever replies with an ad, it goes directly into the trash.

Digital-Citizen 9y ago

Amazon Echo might be "an ad machine" but that article is a good example of business-minded misdirection: using a relatively minor problem -- persistent advertising -- to deflect attention away from a much greater problem -- persistent spying -- where businesses are the main beneficiaries of the misdirection. The real problem with Echo is that it's an always-on microphone connected to a networked computer that runs proprietary software (see https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ for how proprietary software is often malware). Users have no software freedom to inspect what the software on the Echo does, change the Echo's software to make the Echo do something different, or share the Echo software (whether modified or not) to help their community. Even if Echo's software comes with some form of user controls, those controls are implemented with proprietary software, software users cannot trust. No matter how technical and willing a user is to improve their Echo device to meet their needs, the permission to do so is purposefully missing. Amazon does not respect a user's software freedom. Therefore there's no good reason to trust the Echo. For all we know Echo is now or at some later time will relay whatever is within mic range to someplace else, thus presenting a constant threat to one's privacy. Nobody needs Echo; it does nothing users weren't perfectly fine to do another way by visiting a website to place orders. But one should reconsider doing business with Amazon at all (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html https://stallman.org/amazon.html for details).

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I think there's a huge benefit to talking about the ad problem here. One of the reasons it is hard for linking/quoting Stallman to actually get you anywhere in discussion is that the Stallman view is one of absolute philosophy. "This is philosophically wrong" is not something the average consumer cares about, just like privacy invasion is a ghost nobody cares about until they see its effects. Things like convenience and things being free are very visible, noticeable traits, and the counter to those arguments need to also be visible. Advertising is a very visible effect of both privacy-invasive systems and proprietary software. People care about how ads affect them because they can see it.
- Digital-Citizen 9y ago

alyxhorace 9y ago

Preface: I work for Mycroft, mentioned earlier in the thread. We're the open source alternative to the Amazon Alexa and Google home. This makes us customizable, privacy-minded, and neutral. The thing with the current voice assistants is that they store every. single. piece. of voice snippets they hear. Those recordings sit on their servers. At the end of the day, these corporations have a purpose other than creating a voice technology--they have very specific ways to pay the bills. Amazon is an e-commerce platform. Google lives off AdWords. To think they won't utilize the data they're collecting.. doesn't sound like a strategic decision they'd make. For those looking for a voice assistant that represents them--and not the corporation behind it, is Mycroft. A way to democratize voice and AI. Nonetheless, we're in the process of making our second device and if you're interested, you can get updates on it in the link below! We'd love for you to join our community and help us create an open voice assistant. Head to https://mycroft.ai https://mycroft.ai :) https://mycroft.ai/kickstarter-mark-2/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Something+Big+is+Coming&utm_campaign=Teaser+Email+%231+%7C+Something+Big+is+Coming https://mycroft.ai/kickstarter-mark-2/?utm_source=ActiveCamp...